The Travels and Travails of a Modern Knight

On the floor and table of Sir Edward A. Artis’ dining room, there are four military parachutes, two satellite phones, a digital camera, a video camera, a suitcase packed with solar panels, several open suitcases, computers, radios, backpacks and a prosthetic leg, standing by itself.

“Here, feel this,” he says.

He hands over a vest, very heavy. “Bulletproof,” he says.

Two workmen are fixing his burglar alarm, so his wife and house in West Hills will be more secure while he’s gone.

A phone rings.

Sir Edward answers it, then says, “Look, the fighting’s only going to be 50 miles from us.”

He listens.

“If we fly over their airspace, they’ll shoot us down,” he says. “They’ve already made that very clear.”

He listens.

“No, I don’t WANT to be dead,” he jokes. “I can’t fix that with a handicapped sticker.”

He listens.

“OK, look,” he says. “If we have to abort Afghanistan, we’ll probably go to Iran or Iraq.”

He hangs up.

*

I first heard of Ed Artis through a mutual friend. I think this was right after Artis had returned from a mission in Rwanda.

While watching the news on television, Artis had seen a harrowing scene from Rwanda’s conflict that had left more than 1.5 million dead and resulted in 3.5 million refugees, many of them starving. He saw a Rwandan fall off a truck, get run over, then be tossed casually onto a second truck, which was littered with corpses.

Artis quickly got organized. He flew to Uganda, then arranged for himself and Dr. Jim Laws, an Ohio cardiologist, to be driven from the airport at Entebbe to the worst of the genocide, 10 1/2 hours away in Kigali.

There he found a United Nations representative. Artis gave him six packs of medicine.

“What do you want?” the U.N. man said.

“Nothing,” Artis replied.

He and Laws spent 16 days delivering aid to the suffering, stepping carefully along heavily land-mined paths. They caught cholera themselves and risked exposure to far more deadly ailments.

Upon learning from a Catholic priest that 21 nuns had been missing for nearly four months, either kidnapped or in hiding, Artis says he persuaded a French Foreign Legion unit to attempt to rescue the nuns, which they did.

Then he came home. Then he left again.

To Chechnya, where he was thrown off a train and left in the middle of nowhere. To Cuba, where he was tossed in a 31-foot boat by a storm near Key West, injuring his back. To Afghanistan, where he helped find prisoners of war and remains of Russian and Afghan servicemen. To Nicaragua, to Latvia, to Cambodia, wherever anyone needed help.

A former Vietnam paratrooper and medic, Artis, 53, calls it his avocation. He is unpaid for his efforts and has no job. His wife supports them, and the financial strain has been hard. Corporations donate equipment. Supporters help pay bills. World health organizations provide food and medicine. Otherwise, Artis scrapes and scrounges for whatever he can find.

“Not to brag, but I am the best scrounger in the world,” says Sir Edward.

The title is from his standing as a commander of the Knights of Malta. It is an ancient order, steeped in chivalry.

Humanitarian work is the heart of the order. If it means risking life and limb, so be it.

Being a modern knight isn’t easy.

The original ones didn’t parachute into combat zones, with rockets flying over their heads.

*

He was a tough kid from Concord, Calif., who got busted a couple of times for petty crimes. In Vietnam, though, he got hooked on doing good, whether it meant bringing food to an orphanage or helping to amputate a North Vietnamese soldier’s arm.

As a civilian, Artis held regular jobs for a while. The work seemed insignificant to him compared to this.

He leaves today for Cambodia. From there, a shipment of food, medicine and artificial limbs will be waiting in Uzbekistan. To get it to the Bamiyan province of Afghanistan, which has been ravaged not only by war but by weather, Artis will try to fly. If a plane cannot land, he will drop by parachute instead.

“How do you explain to people why you do what you do?” I ask.

“How can I not?” he says.

Mike Downey’s column appears Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Write to him at Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles 90053, or phone (213) 237-7366.